Haste! No Evil Options in D&DNext PHB, Playsets, Plot, and more!

Announcements

We’re back, sorry for podfading! We’ve got a regular recording schedule now so rest assured you’ll be hearing from us on the weekly again. There’s still some time to caption the d20Monkey comic too, so get to it before it’s too late! Now, on with the show!

Topics

Because Plot is Not Enough

Another great article on Gnomestew about how plot is not good enough reason, and how if you railroad your characters into your plotlines you’re just going to make a mess of things for everyone. While not exactly a fresh topic, the article here has a really good take on how to approach these things and makes some good comparisons, although Micah still disagrees with one of them.

Playsets

A recently funded Kickstarter for a new kind of virtual tabletop app called Playsets has us talking. It’s a really slick looking app but we’re a little confused on the message it sends, regardless we’re pretty excited about it. Let us know what you think!

No Evil Character Options in D&DNext PHB

While we’re not typically ones to report news based on tweets from people, it’s a pretty significant bit of info for the D&D world that Mike Mearls revealed earlier last week that the 5e PHB will not have options for PCs of evil alignment, or options like the antipaladin and that these things will be in the DMG. Micah and I discuss why were are fully in favor of this. Tell us what you think!

Tip Corner

Use the top search bar, luke! The search bar at the top is incredibly powerful now, allowing you to insta-jump to characters, wiki pages, and all kinds of stuff just by typing part of a name or tag. If you’re not using it, you’re probably clicking too much to get where you need to be!

Question

Scott Hardy‏ (@Gamesdisk) asks: How to deal with people not marking off items on their sheets after they use em?

Can this be any more insulting to players and GMs?
Whatever the moral police decide we all have to live with. Perhaps macaroni picture art and kid safe glue making craft will be required skill options.
Evil PC based games are rampant and to leave them out deals a significant blow to most of the games I play in. Good luck with your happy-happy land. I could go on by calling the maneuver conservative, prudish, oppressive, and other not so polite words. However, maybe the blanks have a real reason for not including this option for the Players.
I get the impression that they also believe it’s the GM’s game, and the players are only along for the ride. Not true, but keep thinking that way and ruin it for the rest of us.

Unless you are playing in a hardcore tournament rules heavy RPGA session, it doesn’t matter.

A GM running a game can allow or disallow anything they want to. My group usually talks about alignment ahead of time, as one player deciding to go evil when the rest of us are good can really throw things off. We usually solve it by looking at it from an in character point of view.

“We’re good adventurers, we kill evil things. Why wouldn’t we kill you if you are evil?”

A few times the player in question tried to get around it by saying “I’m not evil, I’m chaotic neutral” So the rest of us stopped paying attention to what his alignment said and merely informed him that if we saw him doing things that we considered evil, he was a target. We only had to follow through and kill one of his characters before he got the point.

Moral of the story, your actions decide your alignment while playing, not whats on the sheet.

One could come up with as many examples of a Lawful Good Paladin making the game un-fun for everyone. Both extremes can be found in the history of gaming. I do think people do not understand the nature of heroic fantasy – alignment is not as big a deal as focus. Alignment should be flavor to the characters and allowing evil lets characters be more nuanced.

I am currently running a good vs. evil campaign, a totally good team and a totally evil team on the exact same quest, they have even encountered each other and they are grownups who realize that they are enemies. As DM I tell people this adventure will consist of alignments of blah blah and these are the class options too. What is up with assuming DM’s are weak? Since AD&D started “reinventing” themselves they have not done nothing but wimpyfied the game for the whiners!!! 4 was a joke, and this 5 sounds worse! We use 2nd edition with modified house rules to incorporate some of the more interesting 3rd edition stuff. I just came off DMing a 10 year IRL game of 1 year of character life with 13 players against a super bad guy who had time and a time related artifact as part of his arsenal. Aaaannnd had 3 other DM’s contribute to a segment of the story!!! So yeah leave the evil characters alone and help create better DM’s and you will have better games.

I have to say I disagree with you on the matter of tracking resources. If you ignore spending resources, then why bother tracking what gold you find?

Instead, how about players be mature enough to accurately maintain their records of usage? Use physical representations if you want, but handwaving the amount of available ammunition or the available rations completely breaks immersion for me– there’s tension in realizing I’m running out of ammo, in realizing there’s not much left in the supplies, or in discovering we’re missing enough rope. Why would you discard that source of tension, just because?

Ben, while I don’t totally disagree with you I think this all goes back to what Micah said re: the type of game you’re running. If rations and arrows are infinitely available it seems very tedious to track. In other cases though I totally see why tracking them would add value to the game.

This is the kind of crap that 4e pulled that ticked me off. Reducing the options available in terms of alignment choices was a bad call in 4e and I would’ve thought that Hasbro would’ve learned its lesson here from poor sales. I can see that my choice to stay with Pathfinder will stand firm already based on the final play test packet as well. The more they screw up, the more customers that Hasbro will drive to its competitors. Pathfinder outsold 4e from the get-go, Hasbro should be looking at what made 3.5 so popular instead of reinventing the wheel all over again with another half-assed edition that won’t sell. The few 4e books I own are going into a box to be placed on storage. They haven’t seen any use since I decided to run Pathfinder. My 3.5 and 2e books are seeing much better use right now. If Hasbro can’t give us options to make good guys and bad guys up front in core rule books, they’ve made another bad edition.

Good to see D&D taking further strides away from roleplaying and towards a paper based computer game. The whole idea of creating rules about morality in the first place was ludicrous – now making the D&D genre even more constrained just really highlights how little roleplaying is actually in the rules. If you want a roleplaying game – it all happens OUTSIDE of the D&D rules.

I’m not sure if you listened to the podcast or not but they *do* state that these options would be placed within the DMG instead of the PHB, they are not talking about removing them from the game entirely by any means.

as much as I am against EVIL players in my campaigns, I think the whole thing is a money grab by D&D. doesn’t matter what the company is, they just want a hundred+ books to make more money and make the game more complicated. this is why I left the D&D community in the first place. the game has become too complicated with too many books. tell any player that you are running a campaign with just the core 3 books; 9 out of 10 will walk away.
as for EVIL players, forget it. one evil player = party hostilities. if the paladin won’t stop the evil guy from killing children, then he is not a paladin. if the pally stops the evil player then hostility divides the party ending in violence within the party.
even an all evil party, evil hates evil. whether for power or personal gain. evil will turn on evil, eventually destroying the party collective.
I always say no evils. if a player disrupts party unity and ruins fun for others, I will kick them provided the other players are in agreement. I

Hi! First time listener here, nice podcast. I agree with you on the D&D thing, but I’m totally going to be that guy you were talking about. I have a group who regularly bounces back and forth on different campaigns and playstyles and we’ve taken part in many Evil campaigns that have been very successful.

If you ask me the secret to evil working right, is very similar to your strategy on keeping the players from killing an NPC. Don’t let us get the option to muck it up. In most of our evil campaigns (usually the best ones) we were minions or henchmen of a very powerful (and usually not present) Evil being. It gave us the structure we needed to not stab each other in the back, and usually allowed us to form strong enough bonds to stick together by the time we grew enough power to kill our overlord and get to doing some evil out on our own.

On the subject of the Playsets app, if you’re really hung up on the forced genre of the whole thing have you heard of Storyscape? They seem to be going the opposite direction by building a system from the ground up solely for the purpose of their tabletop app, but they’re designing it to be customisable to play all type of genre’s. They’re even planning on putting an integrated store in the thing to allow DM’s to trade and sell their own campaign settings and user generated content.

If it lives up to all the stuff it wants to do, it’s gonna be a pretty sweet setup that bears looking into, if it’s kickstarter gets funded (it should be going live in about a week. check it out http://www.slabtowngames.com)

that each roll of the die is independent of all other dice rolls. So just beuasce you rolled 3 20’s in a row doesn’t affect the chance that you are going to roll a 20. Likewise, you might roll lots of 1s There’s an old military saying that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. We can also say that no PC plan survives contact with the dice! So your plan has to be good enough that it can survive several bad dice rolls. I mean, no plan can survive straight critical failures. But it should not require successes on every roll, either. Old school:The DM hates you.The rules hate you.The dice hate you.Only your wits can save you.